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Satellite Boy - Trailer

Pete lives with his grandfather in an old abandoned outdoor cinema in the desert. When the old drive-in is threatened with demolition, ten year old Pete takes off to the city with his best mate Kalmain, to save his home.

The stretch of the Kimberley where Satellite Boy takes place seems to exist in a time zone of its own.

Twelve-year-old Pete (Cameron Wallaby) and his grandfather, Old Jagamarra (David Gulpilil), a tribal elder, have made their home on the outskirts of Wyndham in an abandoned drive-in cinema that looks like the last remnant of a failed civilisation.

They won't be there much longer because a mining company is about to evict them, but whatever the future has in store, Jagamarra will retain his ties to the past, living according to the signs he reads in the land under his feet.

Walkabout: David Gulpilil (left) and Cameron Wallaby journey between old and new worlds in Catriona McKenzie's Satellite Boy.Photo: Supplied

Young Pete feels differently. Fond as he is of his grandfather, he's getting bored by his lessons about the significance of the old ways. And he's missing his mother, who has left him and Jagamarra for a new life in the city. There's an old telephone booth among the ruins of the drive-in and he spends a lot of time playing with it, hoping she'll call. It's his own personal model of Doctor Who's Tardis.

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Writer-director Catriona McKenzie, who has done a lot of work on TV's revelatory Redfern Now, is calling the film a fable, and not just because of the sense of other-worldliness that infuses its mood and setting. It's for romantics. Pete may be facing an all-important question - how do young indigenous people make their way in the modern world while preserving the links with their heritage? - but there's more Mark Twain than Redfern Now in the adventure, which helps him make up his mind.

It's a picaresque tale. He and his best friend Kalmain (Joseph Pedley) get into trouble with the police by managing to blow up a derelict camper van they find in the desert. Pete is let off with a warning because of the community's respect for his grandfather but Kalmain is charged and now faces the strong possibility of being sent to a boys' home. But, for the moment, he's free so the two of them take to the road on bicycles with a bottle of water and an apple, heading for the city, where Pete hopes to find his mother.

The experiences that follow focus on the magical properties of the landscape rather than the people they meet en route. Pete is determined to put Jagamarra's lessons to use by surviving "old style", living off what they can forage from the bush. They make a promising start by mending a flat bike tyre using an inner tube and dried grass.

There are poignant echoes of Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout (1971), the film that first brought Gulpilil to the screen as a teenager, cast as an Aboriginal boy who uses his skills as a hunter and gatherer to save the lives of two lost white children. Now, as an old man, he's performing the same service for two indigenous youngsters but this time, it's by remote control because all he can do is worry about them while they find their own path through the country.

Roeg was an Englishman who photographed the outback as if he had happened on a previously unexplored and eerily beautiful planet utterly unlike his own. His film was a fairytale - as is this one, which was shot by Geoffrey Simpson, one of Australian cinema's greats. He photographed Oscar and Lucinda and Romulus, My Father and he has a fine eye for the outback's pale greens, golds and ochres. But McKenzie takes a different tack from Roeg. She's interested in the many ways in which past and present play off one another. In one scene, the boys happen on an empty homestead and go through its cupboards and wardrobes, fascinated by the thought of one family possessing so much stuff. They venture into the sandstone wonderland of the Bungle Bungles, marvelling at its domes and caves before setting off again to make another discovery, which is almost as fantastical. It's a satellite dish and they clamber into it and go to sleep, gazing at the stars.

McKenzie's script never really gets to grips with the realities of Pete's predicament - his sense of being caught between the old and new worlds.

She takes the tactful way out, as well as the most romantic one, persuasively canvassing the values and virtues of teaching the young the traditional ways without facing any of the adjustments that they have to make in facing up to the inevitability of change. But I guess those questions belong in a different film, probably one that's much tougher. This one tells a gentle tale about the sustaining glories of the natural world, the spirit of adventure and the interconnectedness between the past and the future.